UC Berkeley Web Feature

Cattle at a
feed lot(USDA photo)

Window opens providing glimpse of how
we raise cattle – and it's not a pretty picture

By Michael Pollan |
26 January 2004

Michael Pollan is Knight Professor of Journalism
at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and director
of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism.
This story
was
originally published in the New York Times Magazine on
January 11, 2004.

It's hard to say whether an American hamburger was appreciably
less safe to eat the day after a Holstein cow tested positive
for bovine spongiform encephalopathy in Washington State
last month than it was the day before, but it had sure
gotten less appetizing. The news cracked open a door on
the industrial kitchen where America's meat is prepared,
and what we glimpsed on the other side was enough to send
even the heartiest diner to the vegetarian entree or the
fish special.

We learned, for example, that the beef we have been eating
until the U.S.D.A.'s sudden change of heart about the practice)
might consist in whole or part of meat from a ''downer
cow,'' an animal so sick and hobbled that it must be dragged
to the slaughterhouse with chains or pushed by a front-end
loader. Then, before finding its way into a frankfurter,
the carcass of that animal is often subjected to an ''Advanced
Meat Recovery System'' that is so efficient at stripping
flesh from spinal cord that the chances are good (35 percent,
in one study) that the resultant frankfurter contains ''central
nervous system tissue'' – precisely the tissue most likely
to contain the infectious prions thought to communicate
B.S.E.

UC Berkeley journalism professor
Michael Pollan (Judith
Belzer photo)

So: We have been eating downers and really picking their
bones clean. And what did these animals eat in turn? Many
of us were surprised to learn that despite the F.D.A.'s
1997 ban on feeding cattle cattle meat and bone meal, feedlots
continue to rear these herbivores as cannibals. When young,
they routinely receive ''milk replacer'' made from bovine
blood; later, their daily ration is apt to contain rendered
cattle fat as well as feed made from ground-up pigs and
chickens – pigs and chickens that may themselves have
grown up on a diet of ground-up cows. But the grossest
feedlot dish we read about in our newspapers over breakfast
has to be ''chicken litter,'' the nasty stuff shoveled
out of chicken houses – bedding, feathers and overlooked
chicken feed. Since this chicken feed may contain the same
bovine meat and bone meal that F.D.A. rules prohibit in
cattle feed, those rules are, in effect, all but guaranteed
to break themselves. Oh, yes, I forgot to mention one of
the ingredients in chicken litter:
chicken feces, which the U.S. cattle industry regards as
a source of protein.

Whatever else it is – nutritious, economical, the polar
opposite of wasteful – you can't help feeling that the
convoluted new food chain that industrial agriculture has
devised for the animals we eat (and thus for us) is, to
be unscientific for a moment, disgusting.

I know, I'm offering an aesthetic judgment of a system
designed not for beauty but for efficiency. Protein is
protein, goes the logic of this system, whether you find
it in an animal muscle, a soybean or a chicken dropping:
this reductionism is the world-beating formula that drives
industrial agriculture, and it works, up to a point. By
feeding the absolute cheapest forms of energy and protein
to animals it treats as machines, the industrial food chain
has succeeded in making the protein we eat unimaginably
cheap. Just look at what you can get for a buck or two
at Wal-Mart or McDonald's.

But there is a problem. By the reductive logic that rules
our food system, cannibalism should be as legitimate a
way of eating as any other: it's all just protein, right?
Yet the great unlearned lesson of B.S.E. and other similar
brain-wasting diseases is that, at the level of species
or ecosystems, it isn't quite true that protein is protein.
Eating the protein of your own species, for example, carries
special risks. The Fore of New Guinea were nearly wiped
out by kuru, which bears a striking resemblance to B.S.E.;
they spread it among themselves by ritually eating the
brains of their dead kin.

Biologists think that evolution probably selected against
cannibalism as a way to avoid such infections (among other
things). Many animals' instinctive aversion to their own
feces and to the carcasses of their species may represent
similar strategies to avoid infectious microbes and parasites.
Through natural selection, animals have developed what
amount to a set of hygiene rules that function much like
taboos. One of the most off-putting things about factory
farms is how cavalierly they flout these evolutionary rules,
forcing animals to overcome deeply ingrained aversions.
For their instincts we substitute antibiotics.

Life as a human omnivore is more complicated and risky.
When you can eat almost anything, how do you avoid the
dangers nature presents, the plant toxins and parasites
and lethal microbes? We have culture to guide us (traditions,
science, Jane Brody), but surely even we can still hear
older voices, aversions (to rot) and attractions (to sweetness)
that still speak when we encounter a plate of food. In
matters as fundamental to our animal lives as choosing
what to eat, perhaps our aesthetic sense of things is not
just aesthetic but is informed by something deeper, something
we would do well to heed.

For tens of thousands of years, we have been eating the
flesh of ruminants that live on grass. The rightness of
that picture – a bovine grazing on grassland – goes way
back, maybe all the way to the savanna. And while that
picture has recently been eclipsed by nauseating images
of modern meat production, the grass-fed ruminant and the
vegetarian herbivore are not extinct yet.

For several years now, an alternative, postindustrial
food chain has been taking shape, its growth fueled by
one ''food scare'' after another: Alar, G.M.O.'s, rBGH,
E. coli 0157:H7; now B.S.E. Whatever science told us about
the risks of these novel industrial entrees and sides,
something else told us we might want to order something
more appetizing: organic, hormone-free, grass-finished.
It might cost more, but it's possible again to eat meat
from a short, legible food chain consisting of little more
than sunlight, grass and ruminants. Back to the future:
a 21st-century savanna. If, as seems probable, this landscape
should now expand at the expense of the feedlot, then something
good – even beautiful – will have come of this poor mad
cow.

Michael Pollan is a contributing writer for The New York
Times Magazine.